[HN Gopher] The Babel Routing Protocol
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       The Babel Routing Protocol
        
       Author : simonpure
       Score  : 31 points
       Date   : 2020-12-21 12:50 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (tools.ietf.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (tools.ietf.org)
        
       | motohagiography wrote:
       | In the security considerations, it appears to recommend using
       | external application security controls for it:
       | 
       | https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-babel-rfc6126bis-20#s...
       | 
       | To me, that seems like an attractive nuisance, where it's likely
       | something that's really easy to implement and operate, and then
       | build things that rely on it that are more valuable to where the
       | idea it's strung together with something as lightweight as Babel
       | becomes insanely irresponsible. Kind of like its predecessor
       | RIPv1. The idea of publishing or implementing a new routing
       | protocol that doesn't have cryptographic verification designed
       | into it as a feature seems like sabotage.
       | 
       | My day to day is dealing with the consequences of devops teams
       | launching low-security infrastructure and then clients wanting to
       | migrate their high-sensitivity data to it, and this Babel spec is
       | precisely the kind of thing that causes that conflict.
       | 
       | Sure, build something untrusted that forces people to implement
       | their own security that is at a level sufficient for themselves.
       | I understand that as a reasonable design principle, but perhaps I
       | have been out of the game too long, as seeing how these things
       | play out, it's not clear how a routing protocol without at least
       | signed updates is a good idea.
        
       | machello13 wrote:
       | Can someone explain what an application of this might be?
        
         | detaro wrote:
         | AFAIK a main goal is a routing protocol that handles mesh
         | networks well.
        
         | nisa wrote:
         | it's used for mesh networks (but can also be used for other
         | applications) - some freifunk communities in germany use it and
         | there is ongoing development to port the most popular mesh
         | firmware called gluon to use babel as it's a layer3 mesh and
         | gluon is using a layer2 mesh (using B.A.T.M.A.N) - layer3
         | scales better because with more nodes you have a noisy switch
         | on layer2.
         | 
         | Fascinating stuff - if you want to learn more about babel here
         | is a technical talk from the developer:
         | https://www.battlemesh.org/BattleMeshV8/Agenda?action=Attach...
        
         | _nhynes wrote:
         | The intro suggests that it's for "unstable networks." The
         | protocol is required by the HomeNet project [0, 1], so
         | residential networking (possibly including IoT) seems to be one
         | application.
         | 
         | [0]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/homenet/about/
         | 
         | [1]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-homenet-babel-
         | pr...
        
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       (page generated 2020-12-21 23:01 UTC)